Small Broken Figures
by Mashpotatoe Queen
Summary: Thanos is defeated, but scars and emotional hurts will linger far longer even after he's gone, and everyone has issues. They are mourning and hurting and clinging for a semblance of peace and balance. They are tired and lost and scared. They are small broken figures that bore the weight of the world and made it out alive, but certainly not in one piece. (Includes everybody.)
1. Broken Puzzle Pieces

**This isn't really connected or focused and is more of a vent fic after watching the pure depression that is Infinity War. I might extend each of these blurbs into their own thing later, but for now there is this.**

 **Please keep note of that this fic includes panic attacks and mourning and death and depression and such! I would hate to trigger somebody.**

 **Let me know if there's any one section you guys especially want expanded on. :)**

 **...**

Peter stands in a stall of his high schools bathroom, and he stands very, very still.

It's hard to breathe, it's hard to _think,_ but he stands there with his eyes closed and his senses wide open, and pretends everything is okay.

He looks down.

His hands are shaking, _trembling, trembling, trembling_ , and he pretends he can't imagine his fingers falling apart, fine dust that drifts and separates and blows away. Pretends that he feels solid, reminds himself that he's real, that he's real _that he's real that he's real,_ and still all he seems to be able to do is shake.

He brings his hand to his mouth, bites on his fist, closes his eyes tight, tries not to whine.

He can taste ash on his tongue. Or maybe that's blood.

He shakes, he tries to breathe, and he tries to convince himself that the world won't blow away at any moment.

That _he_ won't blow away at any moment.

He does not succeed.

* * *

Steve sits by his side through the small hours of the morning and the long hours of the day. Bucky knows this, just as Bucky has always been aware of Steve by his side.

That's how they work. They're a pair, through thick and thin, through war times and peace times and all the times in between.

Except when they're not. Except when one falls from a train and into an icy chasm below. Except when one gets frozen in ocean water for sixty five years. Except when they meet again, on opposite sides with hollow hearts and puzzle piece minds, when everything is lost and confusing and angry and _scared._

Except when one calls out a name, takes a step, and crumbles into nothing more than dirt and ash. Except when one has to lose the other not once, but twice.

So Steve sticks by his side, and Bucky lets him.

Broken soldiers leaning on each other, step by step by step.

Bucky wonders when they'll ever reach the end of the line. He wonders if there will ever be a station to sit and rest. He wonders if some fantasy train will ever come pick them up and carry them onwards.

His feet are getting tired.

He is tired.

Looking around, the world seems very tired, too.

* * *

It's not that Sam is afraid of disappearing, exactly.

For him, it was quick. He was there and then he was gone, just like that. There was no time to cry out, no time to register. One moment he existed and the next he had vanished. Qiuck. Easy. Painless.

No, the problem is that he disappeared _alone,_ and that no one could find him, could identify him.

He has a grave, he knows. It is an empty one.

Sam feels a bit empty, too.

Nothing seems to work in making the hallow in his chest fill, and the tension strains tight and _too much_ under his skin.

Sam smiles, stays close and in clear view of people, and waits for the sign that things will be okay.

He's been waiting a very long time for that.

He can wait a little more.

* * *

Thor mourns.

He mourns for his people. He mourns for his homeland. He mourns for his father and his mother. He mourns for Heimdall.

He mourns for his comrades, for the Warriors Three, lost before he could get to them.

He mourns for the Avengers, and their tired broken spirits.

He mourns for his brother.

Around every corner,Thor spots something. A cat with sharp eyes flicks its tail at him. A child with raven hair with a sly smile slides past him.

Around every corner, Thor expects to see him. Expects for the grand reveal that it was another illusion, another scheme, another lie. Never before has he so wished for trickery.

But there is nothing. The cat with intelligent eyes is just a cat. The small black haired child with a gleeful smirk is just a child.

Thor waits. He waits and he mourns, and he regrets the fact that he knows he is just waiting for something he cannot have, and that he keeps waiting anyways.

* * *

For the first time in the longest time, Bruce feels more confident and in control than Hulk, and it is strange.

Strange, and wrong.

He meditates. He meditates for long hours, tries to understand that small part of himself that is him but is not him, the monster that in not a monster, the beast that is not a beast.

Hulk is scared.

Bruce knows about being scared. About being weak. About being hunted and hurt and guilty and broken. He knows about late nights and locked cages and shaking, trembling hands, about losing control.

The Hulk does not.

So Bruce meditates, and he tries, and for once he has the upper hand.

But they have been dealt the same deck, he knows. Knows that they are one and the same, in the end. Knows that some cards are just hidden from sight, that one can't see the backs of the other.

He's playing go fish against himself, and for so long all he had done was hold his cards tight to his chest and try to keep them from slipping, from seeing the Hulk see them.

Now, however, Bruce tentatively places out a single card, asks for the pair. _Here,_ he is saying, _this is how you deal with it. Deal with fear. Deal with pain. This is how you deal with failure._

It is a tentative trust. A trust made with grasping hands and desperate situations and far too much time forcefully connected, but slowly and carefully they stack the cards up and make pairs, one after another, and for the first time in a lifetime Bruce feels like things might turn out alright.

* * *

Rocket is never quite as jeering after the Guardians return from the ashes. It's small things, not pursuing certain jabs when he might have before. Not complaining as much when doing something unpleasant.

Never ever claiming to be captain.

The Guardians let it slide. They're all a little different, now that Gamora is gone. They are all grieving.

(They have brought back those dead from the Snap, but even they cannot bring back everyone.)

Peter listens to old, sad songs and never sings along. The bed feels wrong, the universe off balance, and his heart aches from being broken, from crying and pretending he has no tears, from a thousand little pains and reminders of a woman he loved and never quite understood, and never really had to to know she was everything, to know she was worth a thousand confusions and a thousand heartbreaks.

(He doesn't regret loving her. Maybe that's the hardest part. He would do it again in a heartbeat, would experience every agony from the very start just to have one more moment. He doesn't want to let go. Can't figure out how to let go. And all the music in the world cannot teach him.)

Drax stares out the windows for hours and hours, and indeed he is very, very still. He is still, and the stars seem very endless, and sometimes no one seems to notice his unmoving form, as if he truly is invisible. He somewhat wishes he was, wishes his soul would vanish from sight and mind, because it is an old soul, an old soul that has lost much.

Mantis traces small patterns on every surface, fingers forming shapes and words that only she can see. She does not speak, and her eyes hold a thousand emotions that no one can quite grasp. Bit she grasps all of their emotions, one by one by one, and sometimes she feels like she is drowning.

Nebula flits around the edges, a constant presence that touches and connects to things and people on the ship like some sort of phantom or ghost. She is quiet and cold, but she does not leave, and perhaps that says more than any words spoken aloud.

Groot himself stays close to Rocket, stays close to all of them. His game stays in his hands, and he continues to play with it, but small offshoots spread from his feet and latch onto all of them by the ankle, one by one by one, securing him, anchoring him.

No one protests. It is a relief, an excuse to stay in near proximity at all times for people who have spent far too much hiding emotional scars to properly express themselves and ask outright.

So they all stay close together, trying to sew up a torn family tapestry that already has far too many patches.

But they're not very good at sewing, and their fingers, they bleed.

* * *

Dr. Strange knows that it was the only way.

He knows that it was.

Really.

But sometimes he sees the shattered people that his plan has left in his wake. Sometimes, he sees the anguish and the pain and the terror filled eyes of those who remember it, remember dying and disintegrating and fading, fading, fading into nothing.

(Sometimes, he remembers it himself, and the tremor in his fingers worsens to the point that picking anything up is futile. Wong places his hand on Stephan's shoulder, and the doctor closes his eyes and focuses on that, just on that, and clenches his fists hard and tight.)

But he still exists. All those people still exist. They breathe and live and survive because of that plan, because of the path that he laid out for them all, a one in a million opportunity to win.

So yes, Dr. Strange knows that it was the only way.

But sometimes he sits on his bed and not even the most intricate wards can keep out the thoughts in his head, can keep out the guilt crashing down on him.

And sometimes it's all he can do to just keep existing at all.

* * *

Tony checks. He checks and he rechecks and he creates suits for every scenario and situation. Here is a suit to handle underwater monsters. Here is a suit that is strong and good for pulling and digging. Here is a suit that can make twenty three flavours of ice cream.

He creates. He creates until his eyes fall shut and he collapses, and then he wakes and he creates some more.

Here is a suit that is faster and better and stronger. Here is a suit that is impervious to magic. Here is a suit that isn't metallic.

Here is a suit that can defeat Thanos. Here is a suit that can collect thousands and millions of molecules of dust in seconds, catch tiny specs before they float away.

Here is a suit that can save his friends. Here is a suit that can save Peter. Here is a suit that can save Pepper. Here is a suit that can save Bruce, can save Steve, can save Vision and Wanda and Thor and Stephen and Bucky and Natasha.

Here is a suit.

 _Here, here, here, here-_

He wishes fixing people was as easy as fixing machines.

He wishes fixing _himself_ was as easy as fixing machines.

But it is not, and so he creates.

He creates a thousand beautiful things, and he deconstructs himself piece by piece by piece.

* * *

Wanda sits very still and very quiet, most days.

She watches, she listens. The world spins and spins and spins around her, and all she feels is numb. The colours are dull. The sounds are muffled. Taste and touch register only sometimes, and only in some frame of consciousness that is far, far away.

Some days, she sits in the Avengers Institution. The couch is big and has room to curl up into tight small balls or sit with straight backs and crossed ankles. Wanda does more of the latter than the former, and she watches.

She watches people come and go, come and go, and she never seems to join them.

The world is grey and cold. She thinks, in another life, she might have wished it would warm. Wished it would brighten.

She does not care much either way in this one. It seems rather meaningless, or maybe it seems like nothing at all.

She doesn't know.

She doesn't try to find out, either.

Other times, Wanda goes outside and sits in a small quiet space outback. There are two graves there, under a big willow tree, and sometimes the wind blows just right and the leaves whistle softly in her ears.

She can't quite catch it most days, can't quite appreciate it, but she knows it's there.

The first grave is clean and sleek and new. It is well taken care of, with six letters etched into its smooth features that carve out the sole thing with anything left to her in this world. She knows this, has traced those small letters, has cried.

The second grave is a little older, though still well maintained. This too is a grave she has stood beside, has loved and cried upon, except her mourning then had much more grief and emotion and pain.

Now she is just numb. Numb and tired.

She sits there, the wind blows.

Natasha starts sitting besides her on slow days where the world seems to tilt just a little bit more on track and a little less in chaos. She is silent and quiet, and Wanda knows that even if her senses were strong and steady, this fact would be the same.

It is soothing, in some ways.

Natasha comes with tea. It is warm tea, Wanda knows, because steam comes from it. But it slips down her throat and she feels no heat and tastes no flavour, and the pressure where she holds the cup does not feel really there.

But Natasha sits besides her and the wind softly blows, and Wanda thinks that, if she listens hard enough, she can hear the leaves giving off a soft familiar whistle.

She does not smile. She is too numb to smile, but she takes another sip of tasteless tea and feels the world spin on and on and on, and it is something.

* * *

Shuri allows herself this, and just this, while her brother is gone.

She builds a thousand new innovative technologies, a thousand new ways to protect Wakanda borders and her people. When the Avengers ask for help, she builds what they need and serves in any way she can. She does her duty and sits in councils and sits in war meetings and sits in trials. She does not complain or whine or snark, for she knows responsibility.

There is trial by combat to make her Queen. She stands in the middle of the pooled waters at the edge of a cliff, and her head is high and her heart is pounding. She is not big nor strong, but she is smart and cunning and _fast_.

Still, she feels it would be easier to just leap across the waterfall's great divide and run far, far away until not even the blue skies above can touch her.

But she doesn't. She is proud and she knows responsibility, and she does not.

One by one, the tribes back down.

There is no fighting that day. Not when so much blood has been shed.

 _Blood and dust,_ she thinks, and her heart clenches.

There is no heart shaped herb for her, all of them burned and lost. She will not have the Black Panther's might. She will not see her ancestors before her.

(Her brother, before her.)

So she allows herself this while her brother is gone. She allows herself to create and to lead and to be willing to fight. She does not allow herself to mourn, to fall behind and drown in her elder brother's very large shadow. She does not allow herself to break.

Her people need her. Her nation needs her. She knows responsibility.

She does not allow herself to cry. Not when she learns that T'Challa is ash. Not when she learns her mother has left her, too. Not when she sees the body count or the damages or the long, long list of duties.

She builds a shell around herself, as if it was one of her very intricate machines, and she functions, and she leads, and she leads well.

She knows responsibility.

She _knows._

When her brother returns, this is when she breaks. This is when she screams, angry shrieks of abandonment and fear and a thousand unnamed things pent up in her chest, breaking through every defense at the sight of her brother's face.

And her brother, alive and breathing and _alive,_ reaches out and holds her, and she cries and she cries and she cries until all her mourning and grief and exhaustion crumbles around her.

Her brother cries, too, and they hold each other.

She knows responsibility.

She knows, too, that it is best not to bear it alone.

 **...**

 **Hope you enjoyed!**


	2. Piece One: Stephen Strange

**Hello!**

 **I vanished off the face of the planet. But I am alive!**

 *****WARNINGS*****

 **ANGST AHEAD. ANGST AND TORTURE MENTIONS AND CHARACTER DEATHS AND VIOLENCE AND PANIC ATTACKS AND GUILT AND PTSD. PLEASE DO NOT READ IF IT MIGHT TRIGGER.**

 **...**

Dr. Strange knows that it was the only way.

He knows that it was.

Really.

He sits on nothing, breathes in red dust. The green stone on his chest flares bright, and time opens up for him, bright and colourful and an infinite number of opportunities. Stephen watches flow by, watches the streams of possibilities.

So many chances. So many opportunities.

So few solutions.

Many of them depend on chance, on a coin landing on heads, on a coin landing on tails. These are the options that depend on the roll of a dice, small tiny factors that are up to nature and fate deciding the reality that will occur.

These are the options that he discards, rushing through them one by one by one. He will not let his world be determined by chance, not when the risks are so high. Not when so much depends on them getting this right.

It leaves him with this: fourteen hundred thousand, six hundred and five options, and very little time to explore them. He sets himself to work.

 _Option 1:_

 _They run. They hide in deep catacombs and disappear in wreckages of ships and civilizations long since lost. A blue robotic lady comes, and she is cold and calculative and bearing a vehicle that looks like it could maybe fall apart at any moment._

 _They get on, creep out of hiding places and hidey holes. Travel back to Earth. They regroup with the others, they spread out, the shore defenses._

 _Thanos finds them. He finds them when they hide at bases, when they hide in abandoned civilian houses, when they hide off world. He finds them._

 _He kills them._

 _Strange dies. He dies again and again and again. He dies of strangulation. He dies of a spear to the heart. He dies from being blasted apart from the inside. He dies from a thousand cuts, all open and left to bleed him dry._

 _Thanos gets the stones._

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is no return._

 _Failure._

He picks through futures like one might pick through bookstores, trying to find that perfect story that is hidden away from sight. He reads the words, scans the paragraphs. There are so many of them, and he looks and he searches and he _looks._

It feels like it is not enough. It feels like failure.

But Strange is nothing but persistent. He pushes through.

 _They go back to Earth. They seek out the Scarlet Witch._

 _She tries to destroy the stones._

 _Tries._

 _Something always goes wrong._

 _She dies, someone stabbing her or shooting her or evaporating her. Strange gets captured. The Vision gets captured. There is torture. There is pain._

 _A fight goes wrong. A distraction fails to deploy. A person refuses to fight. The building crumbles, the morals fall._

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is no return._

 _Failure._

 _They find the hero Antman, and the tech shrinks him down small enough to sneak into Thanos' ear. Surely the Titan won't notice- Surely-_

 _He notices. There is a crunch. There is a splat. A body grows, it grows, mangled blood and muscle and bone, and the spider kid turns away and throws up on cold hard asphalt._

 _The kid will soon be in a similar position._

 _They will all soon be in a similar position, shrunk small and crushed flat, left to grow for the world to see, mangled bodies of defeated heroes, the smell thick and the gore sickening._

 _The Peter kid isn't the only one to throw up that day._

 _The Peter kid isn't the only one to die that day._

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is no return._

 _Failure._

Patterns form, for even fate is not a random thing. For people are behaviors and behaviors are patterns. They never win when they go back to earth.

Something always goes wrong when they go back to Earth.

( _Death and pain and misery and agony. People scream, people die, he screams, he dies. There is so much, so much. His hands shake, they shake they shake. He can't get them to stop, can't get any of this to stop-)_

They have to stay in Titan.

He breathes. He starts again.

 _Strange hides the Time Stone and the ragtag group surrounds Thanos. They attack, around and around and around, in whirling oiled machine of motion and pain. Strange uses his portals to swing Peter around and Mantis knocks the Titan out with her powers. Peter and Stark begin to pull the glove off- Star Lord starts questioning about Gamora._

 _Strange gags him and binds his arms. They get the arm off._

 _A moment's breath. Celebration?_

 _No. Thanos breaks free, angry, strong, too powerful. He reaches out, grabs Stark before Strange can even_ think. _The glove is slotted back into place, reality warps, they melt, melt melt- melt into puddles of goo, melt into nothing._

 _Strange is left alone._

 _Torture is painful._

 _Fast, liquid torture. Pain that bleeds into itself like blood into a stream, like his own blood drip, drip, dripping into the soft red earth-_

 _Death is painful._

 _Life drains out of him, slowly, and he does not tell of the stone's whereabouts. Does not betray his sacred duties._

 _It means nothing, in the end. Just that they have a little bit more time, just that Thanos takes a little longer in killing them- one by one by one- and has to spend resources in finding the Time Stone._

 _After that, he goes back to Earth. He finds the Mind Stone._

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is no return._

 _Failure._

 _They fight. They bleed. They bruise._

 _Strange opens up a portal. Opens it up right in the middle of Thanos' big purple neck, slices him open and watches a battle end without so much a whimper._

 _The Titan dies. They cheer._

 _They do not cheer long._

 _Every time, every time, every time Thanos dies in their fight, something happens. Someone finds them. A follower attacks their ship, and their battle weakened frames get overwhelmed. A space pirate thinks_ shiny _and rams into them. There is an engine failure. There is an explosion. There are toxic chemicals in the air or an unexpected asteroid belt._

 _Strange dies. He dies in the great vasts of space. He dies by being torn apart. He dies by flames. He dies by poison and toxic gas._

 _He watches everyone around him, too._

 _Someone gets the glove, and they are not the good guys. They commence with Thanos' plan or follow their own, worse paths._

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is no return._

 _Failure._

 _Strange tells Star Lord about Gamora. Takes him aside and tells him. He has to watch a grown man break down. Has to watch a grown man cry._

 _Strange tells him, lets him know._

 _Strange hides the Time Stone and the ragtag group surrounds Thanos. They attack, around and around and around, in whirling oiled machine of motion and pain. Strange uses his portals to swing Peter around and Mantis knocks the Titan out with her powers. Peter and Stark begin to pull the glove off- Star Lord doesn't start questioning about Gamora: he already knows._

 _Does this sound familiar? It should. It's a slight alteration, not by much. The ending is still the same._

 _Star Lord brushes past Mantis, and there is grief, grief, grief. She gives out, she collapses._

 _Thanos wakes up._

 _Angry, strong, too powerful. He reaches out._

 _Stark gets torn in two. The sound of Spider Man's heartbroken cry will haunt Stephen's dreams for the rest of his life._

 _Drax's back is broken, and he will never walk again. The sickening crunch echoes in the wizard's ears. He watches Star Lord scream. He watches Star Lord die._

 _There is so much death, in these futures. So much death, so much resolution._

 _There is battle. There is blood. There is dust._

 _Torture is painful, but it's a fast torture this time. Thanos takes his hands, his trembling, shaking hands. His miracle workers. His livelihood._

 _Thanos takes his hands. He chops them off._

 _Strange_ screams.

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is no return._

 _Failure._

More trials. More patterns. Thanos cannot be killed here. Not now, not this conflict.

Tony can't be killed. For some reason, Stark plays a key role in the future events, and every time he dies they fail. They fail, they fail, they fail.

Tony can't be killed.

( _He's something special, and even fate agrees.)_

Star Lord cannot find out about Gamora beforehand, cannot be stopped from his rage and grief. Holding him back means meeting their doom.

 _This is love,_ Stephen thinks, _And it is powerful._

His thoughts flit briefly, every so briefly, to Christine. They do not stay long. Cannot stay long. There are futures to explore. Deaths to experience. Tortures to face.

Solutions to find, needles in haystacks to seek.

Strange wishes for a match. Wishes to set the hay on fire and watch it _burn._

But there is no match, there is only him, and he shifts and he shifts and he searches.

His hands grasp needles, but his grip can't hold.

Shaking hands and delicate procedures. Never the best combination.

 _In this future, he watches Stark dive to the side a little quick. Watches a blast meant for the older man hit young flesh and bones, watches Peter's wide eyes squeeze tight in pain, watches the kid fade away to nothing and Stark growl and attack until there is nothing left, until all he is is metal shards and dusty tears._

 _In this future, they are captured, and Strange watches a young tree creature get plucked apart, piece by piece by piece by piece. Watches a raccoon scream and snarl and threaten, watches those angry loud words drop and wither and transform into pleads and begs and whimpers._

 _In this future, Stephen watches a young man with an old soul get tortured. He knows where the mind stone is, will not reveal its location. His face is tired, his eyes are worn, his long dark hair hangs in his face and every torture thrown at him gets no response, not a single whimper, not a single scream._

 _They catch gazes, just once. Strange knows that this is a gaze of a man who has faced too many tortures to count. Knows this is the gaze of a man who has long since died somewhere deep inside, and is just waiting for the rest of his body to catch up._

 _A blonde man besides Stephen is the one who screams, so bound that not a single toe can twitch. In another life, the wizard might have called him a captain. In this life, all he knows him as is desperate. Desperate and heartbroken, desperate and afraid._

 _The blonde escapes, somehow. He yanks himself free, but he does not run away. He runs to the fallen, tortured brown haired man and kneels by his side, places their foreheads together close and quiet and in a bond beyond strength of imagination._

 _"I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you till the end of the line, till the end of the line-"_

 _The brunette closes his eyes- his body catches up- and he doesn't open them._

 _The blonde says nothing, presses close and tight, tears making tracks on a dirt stained face. He trembles, he shakes, he sobs._

 _Repeats, like a broken record, "I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you till the end of the line, till the end of the line-"_

 _(Sometimes, those words play like a soundtrack in Strange's dreams. He hears them many times, in these many futures, for the blonde man seems destined to watch this scenario again and again. The words never fail to haunt him, and he knows they are important. He knows.)_

 _In this future, a young woman with platinum blonde hair and a man with wings of steel escape. They escape, they are quickly captured._

 _The Falcon's wings are torn apart and used as darts. The target was their previous master, and by the end of the affair they are bloody and ruined._

 _So is the body, but Strange can't seem to bring himself to look for more than a second._

 _The woman stands trial next, and there is something different._

 _The woman stares Thanos in the eyes, and there is something there that Strange cannot place. He knows that this lady is a spy, knows she is a part of the Avengers, but he never knew she could be this terrifying. Never knew that her eyes could see into souls in this way._

 _She says something- Strange can't hear it. Everything is muffled and he is drowning, drowning, no air in his lungs and eyes slowly shifting shut- and Thanos roars, loud, angry, uncontrolled and what might have passed as heartbroken if the being was not a monster, not merciless, not who he has become. It is loud, loud enough to reach even Stephen's clogged ears._

 _But there are no happy endings. The woman is killed, and his eyes drift shut..._

 _In this future, they are lined up in a neat row and shot one by one by one. The Scarlet Witch watches. She watches, and her face is washed in tears and her eyes are alive with rage, and she looks to Thanos and Thanos looks back, takes a child's head into hand and blows it up._

 _The woman tips her head back, she screams._

 _Everything goes red. Everything goes black._

 _There is sheer power, just for a moment._

 _And then there is nothing. Nothing at all._

 _In this future, in this future, in this future…_

 _Thousands of futures. Thousands of choices. Thousands of mistakes._

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is no return._

 _Failure._

 _Failure, Failure, Failure._ The word, it drowns him. It swallows him whole. It is everywhere and everything, and his hands shake and his mind searches, searches, searches. He has experienced a thousand pains and a thousand tortures, tasted dust in his mouth and felt blood in his eyes. He has heard the screams of dying souls, heard the sobs of the ones left behind.

(He does not know which is worse.)

Everything shakes. Everything falls apart.

Strange knows it's not his fault.

Really.

Really.

He stumbles upon it on the brink.

A solution.

A broken solution. A painful solution.

But it's what they have, and it goes like this:

 _Strange hides the Time Stone and the ragtag group surrounds Thanos. They attack, around and around and around, in whirling oiled machine of motion and pain. Strange uses his portals to swing Peter around and Mantis knocks the Titan out with her powers. Peter and Stark begin to pull the glove off- Star Lord starts questioning about Gamora._

(Thanos cannot die and Star Lord cannot know about Gamora before the battle. These are the patterns, and Strange knows them well.)

 _Star Lord rages. Thanos wakes up._

 _They battle. They bleed. The moon gets pulled closer and Strange's magic is not enough, reality bending and slipping all wrong and all too fast._

 _They fight, they fight, they fight._

 _There is a threat of death. It is on Tony's head._

(Tony cannot die. Tony cannot know.)

 _Strange reaches out and plucks the stone out of the sky. It is here, and Thanos takes it, and he disappears._

 _They are bloody. They are bleeding._

 _They will soon be disappearing._

 _Everyone will soon be disappearing._

 _There is death, there is death, there is death._

 _There is_ pain. _There is_ devastation. _There is so much of it, he drowns in it, drowns in parents crying over children's empty beds, drowns in children reaching out for adults who are no longer there, drowns in the anguish of half the universe suddenly lost to the people who love them._

 _But…_

 _But there is a return._

 _There is a chance._

 _Solution._

Tony asks him how many times they succeed. And it is one. It is one, and it goes like this, just like this. If they can get this right- _if they can get this right._

They do it.

Strange feels Stark's surprised eyes when he hands over the Time Stone. Strange feels Stark's desperate gaze as he feels his own body disappear into nothingness, collapse into dust.

It is not a bad sensation. It is not painful, not like the tortures he could have experienced.

Not like the pains those who remain will experience, before all this is done.

He says, "There was no other way," and he means it. There is no other way to survive this, to win this. There was no other way but to give up the stone, to let those who fade fade to dust.

There was no other way but these tortures and pains. There was no other way but the tortures and pains to come.

He is apologizing. He is explaining.

He is dying, vanishing, vanishing into dust.

He is dead. He is nothing.

There is nothing, not anymore.

Strange closes his eyes.

He is tired.

The dark is welcome.

In the days after, where Thanos is vanquished and the world is falling apart at the seams and trying to pull itself back together, Strange watches.

He knows that it was the only way.

He knows.

But sometimes, he walks the streets and he sees the shattered people that his plan has left in his wake. Sometimes, he sees the anguish and the pain and the terror filled eyes of those who remember it, remember dying and disintegrating and fading, fading, fading into nothing. It was quick, it was painless, but they were _gone._ They were still _gone,_ and they still had to come back.

A mother holds her child too tights as they go to the store. A teenager kisses her girlfriend's cheek and closes her eyes in quiet frustration, the frustration that is grief and fear and hollow pain that will not go away, not now, not next week, not for a very long time. An elderly couple dances, and the old man keeps having to stop so he can cry.

People are still missing. They faded to dust and came back in the wrong spot. They got lost in the hectic organization systems built up to deal with the sudden surplus of orphans and widows and were taken from the streets before they could ever get home.

Strange looks for them, looks for them in whatever ways he can, a voice crying in his mind _your fault your fault your fault-_

The voice, it drowns him. It drowns everything out.

Strange knows what it's like to drown.

Sometimes, he remembers vanishing into dust himself. It was quick, it was painless, he shouldn't complain.

But death is quiet and life is loud, and the sound rings shrill in his ears, a constant reminder of _alive alive alive,_ and it is tiring.

It stops him from resting, stops him from living, and if that is not ironic, he doesn't know what is.

These days, he feels too aware of his own breaths, and he counts them, and the numbers fumble, and he can't quite keep up.

Sometimes, he remembers worse pains. A thousand tortures. A thousand screams. A thousand deaths.

He says thousands, he means millions.

Numbers fumble.

He falls apart.

His hands shake and shake and shake, they shake until he can't pick anything up, can't even _think_ straight, and everything is just the tremors in his hand, in his body, in his soul.

These hands, he knows, are miracle workers. But they weren't _enough._

Wong finds him tucked away deep in the library. The smell of old books is strong. It smells like paper, it smells like dust.

Strange can't quite seem to breathe, and in his eyes he watches as billions of people vanish into nothing, again and again and again, and he shakes.

He shakes, breathe heaving. He remembers pain. He remembers tortured eyes and tortured hearts and souls. He remembers cruel grins and agonizing terror.

He remembers death.

At this point, he knows it more than he's ever known life.

 _Some hero,_ he thinks, _some hero, to be so weak. Some master, some wizard, some_ ** _hero-_**

 _I never claimed to be one,_ some distant part of him yells, _I never wanted this, any of this-_

The voices play in his head. Strange can't hear them: he's too busy falling apart.

Wong places his hand on Stephan's shoulder, and the doctor closes his eyes and focuses on that, just on that, and clenches his fists hard and tight.

But they do not stop their tremors, and for all his studies, Strange can escape his body, but not his mind.

He meets them. These heroes, these martyrs. Those few beings that fate decided it liked, stuck them into patterns and into lives in which there will always be another fight, another war.

These people, these people who love people, who will give themselves up, every time, because they believe in humanity and the fact that it has something to offer.

Strange knows this. He's seen it.

He shakes the hand of the brown haired man with his too old soul. _Call me Bucky,_ the man says, and Strange nods.

He does not tell the soldier that they have met before, in another life. That they have met a million times before. That Bucky had said the same thing to hm before and had then gone down, choking on blood, and had not gotten back up again.

He does not tell the soldier that he looks into his warm brown eyes- _alive eyes, alive-_ and can only see the dead orbs of a man with a thousand tortures, can only hear the screams and cries and muttered mantra, " _Till the end of the line, till the end of the line-"_

Rocket Raccoon makes a sarcastic comment. Strange snarks back, and pushes away the image of that same face twisted in rage and in grief, that same face begging and pleading and _desperate._

He cannot look Peter in the eyes. Cannot spend more than an hour in Tony's presence. Not for a long time, because he looks at them and he them dying and reaching for eachother, sees them screaming and crying and raging and pained, and his heart becomes lead.

He looks at Falcon, he sees blood, he looks at the Black Widow, and he remembers those deadly, too deep eyes. He is introduced to the Scarlet Witch, and she looks calm and small and soft in her loose sweater and deep raccoon eyes, but Strange has felt her pain, Strange has felt her rage,and she knows not everyone is as they seem.

Strange has felt her power, and he will never forget it.

These heroes, these martyrs. These are Stephen's ghosts, his failures. These are the people who were burned in the fire, who drowned in the floods. These were the people who banded together in future after future, who loved so fiercely and lost so much, who even now look at him with eyes reflecting hidden fears and shoulders stooped under the weight of haunted pasts and too many mistakes.

These are Stephen's ghosts, and they are living and breathing and real, and still he looks at them and feels like this is just another future where they don't make it, where Strange fails them, where he fails them all.

These are his miracle hands. These are his shaking fingers. These are his living ghosts.

Stephen watches them, just as he always had.

He hopes, this time, it doesn't end in tears.

One day, Stephen walks down a street and watches a child break away from her mother's grip and runs towards him. The boy's hands are grubby, covered in ice cream drippings and dirt and saliva, but his grin is wide and his eyes are bright. In his clenched fist, there are a few dandelion flowers with bent stems and missing petals.

He takes those flowers, gentle, so gentle, holds them tight in shaking fingers. The boy laughs, light, alive, and Strange watches.

A teenager kisses her girlfriend's cheek and closes her eyes in quiet frustration. Her girlfriend bops her nose and smiles, almond eyes crinkling under magenta glasses, and the grief and the fear and the hollow pain does not go away, but it settles, and the teenager finds that small reserve of happiness that exists in every person and smiles back.

An elderly couple dances, and the old man keeps having to stop and cry. His wife holds his hands, and the tears pass, and she takes his arm and they spin to a song no one else can hear, old bones and weathered faces and wrinkled hands and all.

Through it all, Stephen watches.

He finds the missing. He finds them, he brings them home. Watches tears leak out of the eyes of person after person, and they are happy tears, relieved tears. He watches hugs. He watches reunions.

The people thank him, and he does not say that he does not deserve their praise, their grace, not when it is his fault in the first place, but he's close to it, every time.

They thank him, and Strange nods his head.

It will have to be enough.

These are the people that exist. These people with their broken healing hearts and resilient smiles. These living ghosts. These splashes of dust, all gathered up, crafted into something new and different but not wholly unbeautiful.

They breathe and they live and they survive.

Strange watches them, because this was the path he had set. Their troubles, their worries, their laughter and sadness and smiles and woes. That is all on him, all on him, because this is the results of his plan, this is the results of the path that he had laid out for them all, a one in a million opportunity to win.

And they won.

So yes, Dr. Strange knows that it was the only way.

But sometimes he sits on his bed and not even the most intricate wards can keep out the thoughts in his head, can keep out the guilt crashing down on him. Sometimes, he watches tired eyes and broken souls and can't quite make himself stay close. Sometimes, he sees ghosts of people who do not exist, lost to chance, lost to fate, lost to the small patterns of behaviors that made everyone up.

And sometimes it's all he can do to just keep existing at all.

These are his miracle hands. These are his shaking fingers. These are his living ghosts.

This is his world. These are his people. He will give himself up for them, every time, because he believes in humanity and the fact that it has something to offer.

He knows this. He's done it.

Fearful gazes. Broken hearts. Angry words and painful tortures, Stephen has seen it all.

This is why he shakes, why he doubts, why he laments.

Small smiles. Relieved tears. Tattered flowers gripped in trembling fingers.

This is why he stays.

 **...**

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